Operational stability of a spectrally encoded optical CDMA system using inexpensive transmitters without spectral control

We show that an 8 x 155.52 Mb/s optical code-division multiple-access syste m applying periodic spectral encoding can be operated with poor quality opt ical filters and only loosely specified optical sources while still achievi ng bit-error rates (BER) = 10(-10) for each transmitter in asynchronous ope ration, It is experimentally found that BER < 10(-9) is maintained, if the optical receiver filter periodicity is changed by up to +/-0.27%. From this finding we deduce that the optical transmitter filters do not need to be a ctively temperature controlled within the range -40 degrees C to +85 degree s C. This robustness is qualitatively understood from a simple crosstalk mo del depicted in the letter.